War of Choice

Marco Rubio and the G.O.P. play a dangerous game on immigration.

Marco Rubio, a Republican who is the junior senator from Florida, has a full head of thick black hair and a movie star’s baby face. He speaks passionately and argues persuasively. Just forty years old, he has the youthful glamour of a Kennedy, with an attractive wife and four children. Tea Party activists love Rubio, and he is surely the most prominent Hispanic Republican in America. His longtime political mentor, Al Cardenas, who is the former Florida Republican state chairman, thinks Rubio’s most winning quality is his humility: “He’s the kind of young man you want as your own son.” Rubio’s parents immigrated from Cuba during the Eisenhower years, and, in his first speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, in June, Rubio sounded a little like a certain former junior senator from Illinois, who soon went on to bigger things. “We should never forget who we Americans are,” he said. “Every single one of us is the descendant of a go-getter. Of dreamers and of believers. Of men and women who took risks and made sacrifices because they wanted their children to live better off than themselves. And so, whether they came here on the Mayflower, on a slave ship, or on an airplane from Havana, we are all descendants of the men and women who built here the nation that saved the world.”

National Republicans say openly that Rubio is a top contender to be the Party’s 2012 Vice-Presidential nominee. He could, they suggest, secure victory for the Party in Florida and win over Hispanic voters in other states, many of whom have been angered by the G.O.P. Presidential candidates’ harsh positions on immigration. Political betting markets list Rubio as many times more likely than anyone else to be the nominee. “Rubio is our superstar,” Ed Rollins, a former Presidential campaign manager for Ronald Reagan, Mike Huckabee, and Michele Bachmann, says. “He would be my first choice. My premise is that if you can add someone to your ticket that gives you a state you don’t have you’re way ahead of the game. No Republican can win without Florida.”

But other Republicans worry that straight identity politics (Republicans need to win over Hispanics; Rubio is Hispanic; Rubio is our savior) might not work in their favor in this case. Rubio’s positions on immigration are to the right of those held by most Hispanic Americans. And these views have helped lead him into a war with Univision, which is the dominant Spanish-language media outlet in the country, and which champions immigration reform. Many national Republicans have stood by Rubio in that conflict, but it is politically risky to fight with a network that has as much influence as Univision and, more important, it is perilous to maintain positions on immigration that anger the majority of Hispanics. Because Rubio comes from the small Cuban community, whose members have long been granted automatic citizenship—as political exiles, not as immigrants—he risks being perceived by Hispanics as an out-of-touch élitist. Earlier this year, the conservative columnist Ruben Navarrette wrote on CNN.com about the political dilemma faced by Rubio and his party: “Marco Rubio is the Republican Party’s Superman. And the immigration issue, if not handled correctly, is his kryptonite.”

Rubio’s fight with Univision began in early July, when Gerardo Reyes, the chief of the network’s investigative unit, called Rubio’s older sister, Barbara Cicilia. Reyes said he had learned that, more than two decades earlier, her husband, Orlando Cicilia, had been convicted as part of a drug-trafficking ring that paid off cops and sold cocaine by the kilo. Other members of the ring had murdered and dismembered a government informer. Barbara said that her husband had never been arrested, and hung up the phone.

But, as Reyes knew, in 1989 a jury had found Cicilia guilty of possessing large quantities of cocaine and marijuana and of travelling to several states to sell and deliver drugs. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. After he was paroled, in 2000, Rubio’s parents went to live with the Cicilias, in their new home; Rubio’s father died in 2010, but his mother still lives there. Cicilia has not been actively engaged in Rubio’s political campaigns, but the night Rubio was elected speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, in November, 2006, he joined the family on the stage. When Rubio ran for the Senate, in 2010, Cicilia’s teen-age son was his travel aide. Orlando Cicilia was on the stage again when Rubio declared victory.

The reach of Univision is often underappreciated. It is watched regularly by two-thirds of all Hispanic television viewers in the U.S. In Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Phoenix, its stations’ newscasts rate higher than those of their English-speaking competitors. Some nights, the network’s national ratings exceed those of ABC, CBS, Fox, or NBC. And the audience is growing, in part because of demographics. Today, fifteen per cent of Americans are Hispanic; in 2050, the percentage will have doubled. According to Univision’s news president, Isaac Lee, the network is openly committed to “pro-Hispanic” immigration reform, and it has a particular slant on the news: a dog biting any man is not a story, but a dog biting a Hispanic man is. Sergio Bendixen, perhaps the leading Hispanic public-opinion researcher in the U.S. and Latin America, says that Univision is the most respected institution among Hispanics in the country, ahead of the armed forces and the Catholic Church. “It is considered to be the institution that protects Latin-Americans in the U.S. and fights the institutions that abuse them,” he says.

Much of the network’s content is soft—it broadcasts seven hours of soap operas daily—and Lee was hired, in December, 2010, to strengthen its reporting. Lee is a prominent journalist from Colombia, where, as a magazine editor, he aggressively pursued drug cartels. He is forty years old and heavyset, with thick dark-gray glasses that dominate his face, a straggly black beard, and an ebullient personality; the first day we met in Miami, he wore an untucked, open-necked shirt. Last year, he hired Reyes, a former member of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team at the Miami Herald, as chief investigator.

Forty minutes after Barbara Cicilia got off the phone with Reyes, Alex Burgos, Senator Rubio’s communications director, e-mailed Univision, asking if someone had made a prank call. Lee responded that it was no prank, and that he wanted “to know the effect that his brother-in-law’s conviction had on his family, as part of a larger profile piece on Rubio.” The next day, Burgos called Reyes and asked why a conviction that occurred when Marco Rubio was a teen-ager was relevant. He noted that the story was not new: in 1987, the Miami Herald had run a front-page article describing the arrest of Cicilia and his cohorts. Burgos also e-mailed Univision’s C.E.O., Randy Falco, complaining that a Univision camera crew had staked out Barbara and Orlando Cicilia’s home. He said that Univision’s pursuit of this story reeked of tabloid journalism. “Is it really your position that the entire life history of every member of a public official’s family is a legitimate news story?”

Falco agreed with Lee that it was: the story was accurate, and Rubio’s family was central to his political narrative. He said that the Senator had to deal with the scrutiny that goes with becoming a national figure. And, even though the details of Orlando Cicilia’s crimes were known to readers twenty years ago, his connection to the sitting senator had never been reported.

A conference call was arranged with Burgos and Todd Harris, Rubio’s senior political adviser. In addition to Lee, five people from Univision were on the call: Reyes, the reporter; the news vice-president, Daniel Coronell; the managing editor, Maria Martinez-Henao; and two senior Univision attorneys. Rubio’s staff wanted to kill the story. Univision wanted Rubio to answer questions on camera.

The call ended civilly, but the next day Burgos e-mailed Lee and declared that, if Univision aired the piece, Senator Rubio would find it “impossible for us to have a productive relationship with your organization.”

On July 11th, four days after the conference call, Univision led off the evening news with the story. The network reported that Senator Rubio “provided generous details about his family” in the past. “But there is one family episode that the Senator does not want to talk about.” In recounting Cicilia’s criminal past, the network took care to note that “Barbara Rubio was not arrested or indicted,” and that Marco Rubio was a high-school student at the time.

The report was personally distressing for Senator Rubio. “He was very upset about this, because it pained his elderly mother, who sits down and watches Univision every night,” Ana Navarro, a close friend, says. “His sister works in a public school. She probably had friends and colleagues who did not know this happened.”

This fall, I discussed the story with the Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, who was away on July 11th but usually hosts the network’s evening news and also has a “Meet the Press”-like Sunday show called “Al Punto.” He is a slim, white-haired man who looks like an older Anderson Cooper. He has held his position for a quarter century and is probably the most visible Hispanic journalist in America. Ramos has written eleven books, mostly about immigration, and the subject fills his broadcasts. “Marco Rubio could be the first Hispanic President of the United States,” Ramos told me, over breakfast in a hotel restaurant, where Hispanic waiters and other employees came over to say hello and take his picture. “We have to know his history. Should we wait for the New York Times or the Washington Post to ask this question?”

Although Univision hyped the story—one Univision Twitter feed announced, “Univision investiga: Marco Rubio’s family’s drug-trafficking past”—it did not initially receive much media attention. For two and a half months, it basically disappeared.

In late September, the Florida Republican Party accomplished a longtime goal of Rubio’s: it moved up its primary from March to January 31st. This meant that Florida would play a bigger role in the selection of a G.O.P. Presidential nominee, and that Rubio, and his endorsement, would likely play a bigger role in the campaign. It also meant that immigration reform—a topic on which a tough stance plays better in Iowa and New Hampshire than in Florida—would become more important. And it gave increased relevance to a debate tentatively scheduled for January 29th on Univision. On September 30th, the primary date was officially changed.

Two days later, the Miami Herald and its Spanish-language sister paper, El Nuevo Herald, published a front-page account of the clash between Univision and Rubio. Written by Manny Garcia, the executive editor and general manager of El Nuevo Herald, and Marc Caputo, a reporter for the paper, it began:

Days before Univision aired a controversial story this summer about the decades-old drug bust of Marco Rubio’s brother-in-law, top staff with the Spanish-language media powerhouse offered what sounded like a deal to the U.S. senator’s staff.

If Rubio appeared on Al Punto—Univision’s national television show, where the topic of immigration would likely be discussed—then the story of his brother-in-law’s troubles would be softened or might not run at all, according to Univision insiders and the Republican senator’s staff. They say the offer was made by Univision’s president of news, Isaac Lee.

The allegation of a shakedown by Univision hinged on comments by Rubio staffers, notes taken by Alex Burgos during the conference call, and unnamed Univision “insiders.” The Herald’s account said that, near the end of the call, Lee “suggested the drug-bust story could change—or not run at all,” if Rubio agreed to be interviewed by Ramos on his Sunday-morning program. The Herald implied that Univision had tried to blackmail the Senator.

The article set off what appears in retrospect to have been a carefully orchestrated campaign. Three Florida Republicans and close Rubio allies—Representative David Rivera; the Florida House majority leader, Carlos Lopez-Cantera; and the Miami-Dade County Republican chairman, Erik Fresen—sent a public letter to the chairman of the Republican National Committee accusing Univision of extortion. They advised all the Republican Presidential candidates not to participate in the planned Univision primary debate on January 29th unless the network issued a public apology and fired Isaac Lee. They were urged to participate instead in a debate to be sponsored by NBC Universal’s Spanish-language network, Telemundo, a network that is growing but whose audience is just over a third the size of Univision’s.

The major Republican Presidential candidates, with the exception of Ron Paul, quickly announced that they would boycott any debate hosted by Univision, unless the network made amends. “Obviously, we don’t want to do anything to alienate Rubio or his constituents,” Rollins told me. Rubio’s friend Ana Navarro, who is now the national Hispanic chair for Jon Huntsman’s campaign, says that she and other senior staff members briefed the candidate and he approved pulling out. She says that she did not speak with Rubio about this, and does not believe that his aides played a role. They didn’t have to, she says. “The reason this happened so quickly is not because Marco Rubio was pushing it but because the three guys who wrote the letter have access to national Republicans.”

Telemundo immediately announced that it wanted to broadcast a Spanish-language debate in December, hosted by its leading anchor, José Diaz-Balart, who is the brother of both a former and a current Republican member of Congress. Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser to John McCain’s 2008 campaign and a former aide to George W. Bush, calls the boycott of Univision “a profoundly shortsighted decision that ignores the changing demographics of the country. It’s on the verge of insanity. Marco Rubio has a legitimate grievance, but the long-term interests of the Republican Party supersede the grievances of a U.S. senator.”

Haim Saban, the chairman of Univision, wrote, in an e-mail, “The fact that Rubio and some Republican Presidential candidates have an anti-Hispanic stand that they don’t want to share with our community is understandable but despicable. So ‘boycotting’ Univision, the largest Spanish-language media company in the U.S., is disingenuous at best and foolish at worst.” Others at Univision go further, saying that the clash was a conspiracy, in which Rubio’s staff, which is closely connected to the national Republican leadership, planted the story in the Herald and helped guide the G.O.P. response.

Rubio’s allies dismiss this theory as ridiculous; they insist that the Miami Herald came up with the story itself, and that there was no coördinated response. Cardenas, who has just been elected national chairman of the American Conservative Union, says that Saban’s statement is offensive. “Who is he to determine what the points of view of all Americans are?” he asks. To imply that thirty million Hispanics in this country “are monolithic in their thought process is insulting to us and more of a plantation mentality,” he says. “We have different points of view all over America.”

When Ronald Reagan ran for reëlection, in 1984, he proclaimed, “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though some time back they may have entered illegally.” After the election, President Reagan signed legislation that granted a path to citizenship to three million Hispanic Americans who had broken the law in the way they came here. Republican strategists today think that their candidate can’t win without receiving at least thirty-five per cent of the Hispanic vote—as George W. Bush did in 2000 and 2004, but as John McCain did not in 2008.

There are eleven million people living in the U.S. who immigrated illegally, and all the Republican candidates oppose virtually any path to citizenship. When Newt Gingrich recently proposed offering legal residency—not citizenship—to those who have been here longer than twenty-five years, he was pilloried.

The Republican candidates seem to have been competing to see who can appear toughest on matters of immigration. Most use phrases like “illegals” or “illegal aliens” rather than “undocumented immigrants.” Although the rate of illegal immigration has declined dramatically in recent years, most of the candidates support a proposal for a barricade that could stretch two thousand miles along the Mexican border. Michele Bachmann has said that she wants a fence to cover “every inch” of the border; Herman Cain, who dropped out of the race in early December, said that this fence might be electrified, and joked that it should have an alligator-filled moat behind it. The Republican candidates, except for Huntsman, oppose the so-called Dream Act, a bill stalled in Congress in which a path to citizenship is provided for some students, and most oppose granting reduced in-state-university tuition rates for those immigrants. They have insisted that English be the country’s official language. Most have also supported Arizona’s new law on undocumented immigrants, which would allow police to stop anyone they deem suspicious and demand proof of citizenship. That law is currently under review by the United States Supreme Court.

In an October debate in Las Vegas, sponsored by CNN, Mitt Romney assailed Rick Perry for allowing a “sixty per cent increase in illegal immigrants” to his state. In response, Perry accused Romney of hiring “illegals” to mow his lawn.

The language appeals to Tea Party activists, who are angry that American laws are being broken and that illegal immigrants fill jobs that could go to Americans. However, it repels others, particularly immigrants. Jorge Ramos, who passionately advocates for an immigration-reform agenda, says that the overwhelming majority of his viewers are offended by the language used by the G.O.P. candidates and are opposed to nearly all the Party’s major immigration proposals. The offense might be less among his viewers in Florida, because the state has large blocs of Puerto Ricans, who are citizens, and of Cuban exiles, who have citizenship because of a 1966 federal law. But about sixty per cent of Hispanic immigrants to this country are from Mexico, and another thirty per cent are from South or Central America. These immigrants make up the core of Univision’s audience.

Marco Rubio does not demonize “illegals,” and, as a Florida state legislator, he co-sponsored Florida’s rough equivalent of the Dream Act. Hispanic lobbying groups in the state thought of him as an immigration-reform advocate. However, his positions have become more conservative. “His immigration stance today is very different from the immigration positions he had when he was a state legislator and speaker of the Florida House,” Arturo Vargas, the executive director of the nonpartisan National Association for Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, says. During the 2010 Senate campaign, Rubio energetically courted the Tea Party, opposing any path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and also the Dream Act. He declared his opposition to Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic appointed to the Supreme Court. She was not a strict interpreter of the Constitution, he said, adding, “I reject the notion that judges should be representative of their sex, race, or class.” Although Jorge Ramos has interviewed every President since George H. W. Bush and every prominent Hispanic public official, he has been unable to lure Rubio to his show to discuss immigration, or anything else.

Marco Rubio’s parents left Cuba in 1956, and settled in Miami, where their son was born, in 1971. The family struggled to make an adequate living, and moved to Las Vegas when Marco was eight; his father worked as a bartender and his mother as a hotel housekeeper. They returned to Miami in 1985, where his father eventually worked as a school crossing guard; his mother was a stock clerk at Kmart. Rubio attended Tarkio College, in Missouri, for a year, and transferred to Santa Fe Community College, then to the University of Florida, from which he graduated. He went to law school at the University of Miami, and while he was there Al Cardenas gave him his first political job, as the Dade County political coördinator for Bob Dole’s 1996 Presidential campaign. Cardenas hired him as a summer intern at his law firm, and recruited him to join the firm when he graduated. In 1998, Rubio married Jeanette Dousdebes; they met as teen-agers, and she had recently worked as a cheerleader for the Miami Dolphins.

Rubio was first elected to the state legislature in 2000, and over the next eight years he became majority whip, majority leader, and then speaker of the Florida House. He was conservative, though not as conservative as he later became. His signature issues were tax and education reform. In 2008, he stepped down as speaker, resumed practicing law, and, during the Presidential campaign, became a TV political analyst for Univision. Two years later, he defeated both Kendrick Meek, an African-American Democratic congressman, and Charlie Crist, the former Republican governor, who ran as an independent, to win a seat in the Senate.

I met Rubio in November in his Washington office. He was wearing a dark suit, a red polka-dot tie, and a pale-blue shirt. He stretched out in his chair, and crossed his legs. Rubio speaks in careful, complete sentences, without the groping pauses common among those new to national politics. The only hint of nervousness came as we talked about immigration: his right foot started twitching up and down, like an accelerating metronome. I asked how he would persuade Hispanic voters that the Republican Presidential candidates are not anti-immigrant.

“Economic issues are predominant,” he said. “Republican policies are a lot better for that than the Democratic Party’s. That’s the fundamental issue. When we talk about rhetoric, particularly rhetoric around immigration, I’ve always said that our emphasis should be on the fact that we’re in favor of legal immigration. And sometimes when the focus is on illegal immigration it creates the impression—unfairly, in many instances—that Republicans are against immigrants or against immigration.” As long as unemployment is high, he said, he would not relax immigration restrictions. But, if it dropped, he would like to ease immigration laws for highly educated immigrants, political refugees, and agricultural workers. However, he opposes all forms of amnesty, because that would reward lawbreakers.

When I asked him about the fence, he responded, “That’s a tactic,” and, “I’m not an expert on immigration tactics and how to enforce the law.” If there were an effective immigration system, the need for such a fence “diminishes over time,” he said. “I’m not against a fence. I’m not sure it solves all of our problems, either,” particularly since “a fence doesn’t do anything” to block the roughly forty per cent of illegal immigrants who come here on legal visas and then stay beyond their expiration. In response to a question about Arizona’s stringent law, he said, “Arizona had a constitutional right to pass that law. And it had a dramatic public-safety need, which is why the state passed it. I don’t believe states should be in the business of doing that. I don’t think Florida needs one of those laws.” He favors a uniform national law but does not specify what it would entail.

I asked if he agrees with analysts who say that winning more than thirty-five per cent of the Hispanic vote is crucial for a Republican victory this fall.

“I think that analyzes the wrong way,” he said. “First of all, it assumes the Hispanic voter is some sort of a voting bloc across the country, when in fact there’s tremendous diversity. A lot of it is geographic.” He added that Hispanics are well assimilated, and that “this idea that immigration is the only issue that Hispanics care about is absurd.”

I cited speculation that he might join the 2012 Republican ticket, to which he responded, “I’m not going to be the Vice-Presidential nominee.”

Is that to say you reject it?

“I do.”

When I pushed, he added, “If I say I’m not going to do it, then I’m not going to accept it.” (Several weeks after our interview, Sentinel announced that it would publish a memoir by Rubio next fall, which would be propitious timing for a Vice-Presidential nominee.)

When we discussed Univision, Rubio strove to appear nonchalant, while dismissing the network’s influence. “I used to work there—they have good soap operas,” he said. “The idea that somehow voters of Hispanic descent somehow only watch a Spanish-speaking network is just not true. I think they get their news from everywhere. Just as we all do. Especially young voters.” According to Nielsen ratings, though, nearly seventy per cent of Univision’s eighteen-to-forty-nine-year-old viewers each night watch no other network. By contrast, less than ten per cent of the audience of NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox watches only those stations.

Rubio waved away a question about his brother-in-law’s conviction. “It doesn’t even merit discussion,” he said. When I asked for a fuller explanation, he replied, “I just don’t think that’s a valid news story that a news organization runs. I thought that was a tabloid news item. I don’t deal with tabloids.” He spoke calmly, but his right leg jiggled faster.

Before leaving, I mentioned that the two aides on the conference call with Univision had said that the network tried to shake them down, and asked if he agreed.

“I don’t have anything to add.”

Could I see the notes that Alex Burgos took during the call?

After I asked a second time, he said, “It’s fine.”

If Univision did try to blackmail Rubio, there would be a simple explanation for the controversy this fall. Employees at the network might have heard about it and taken the story to the Miami Herald. The Herald might have got confirmation from Rubio’s staff. After the story ran, the Republican Presidential candidates might have been genuinely outraged at Univision’s yellow journalism and decided that they should not dignify the network with a debate.

This pristine explanation, however, is too simple. The notes of the conversation between Rubio’s office and Univision don’t provide a convincing case that Univision proposed dropping any mention of Senator Rubio’s brother-in-law’s criminal past if Rubio consented to an interview. They, and interviews with the people involved in the conflict, suggest that a complicated and politically risky game unfolded as the Republican Party shifted the date of the Florida primary. Rubio had every reason to want to punish Univision, and the national Republican Party had every reason to want to avoid holding a debate on a network that would ask aggressive questions about immigration. Both got what they desired, but perhaps at a cost.

Burgos’s notes from the July conference call with Univision are written in neat, small script on two pages of a flip notebook. The phone dialogue, mostly between Todd Harris and Isaac Lee, unfolds:

TODD: Don’t understand rationale for doing story. Absurd.

ISAAC: Just doing our job. . . .

TODD: Just because stories are interesting they don’t turn into national news stories. Fair game if this were a current issue.

The notes eventually report that Lee said Univision would “abandon this piece in favor of ‘Al Punto,’ ” but the next sentence contradicts this, saying that Lee made “no promises.” Later, Burgos writes a comment of his own: “quid pro quo.” But the notes also say that Lee said he would offer “no guarantees” to kill the story if Senator Rubio granted a full interview. The notes conclude with Burgos asking if the story might not run if Senator Rubio coöperated on a profile of his life or gave an interview on “Al Punto.”

Lee’s response, Burgos writes, was “Your interpretation is fair.” Lee says, however, that he offered three Univision options: report a stand-alone news story on Orlando Cicilia; have Senator Rubio coöperate on a network profile; or have him be interviewed on Jorge Ramos’s “Al Punto.” Whatever the venue, Lee says, the issue of Orlando Cicilia would have been raised.

The Herald portrayed the conversation as a shakedown; the notes suggest a contentious discussion. Furthermore, all six of the Univision employees on the call deny that there was any such offer and say they were not called. When I asked Manny Garcia, one of the article’s co-authors, whether any of the “Univision insiders” he spoke to were among those six, at first he told me that the network wouldn’t “volunteer” anyone on the call. He went on to say, “The sources were just people with knowledge of the conversation”—meaning that he hadn’t talked to anyone on the call. Later, he said that he wouldn’t discuss specific sources.

All the Univision news-department people on that call say that the Herald story was unfair, and have expressed pride in how Lee acted. “I left the conference call feeling good, confident that we had conducted ourselves in the utmost professional manner,” the managing editor, Maria Martinez-Henao, told me. At the end of the call, the news vice-president, Daniel Coronell, told me, the two lawyers “applauded.” Reyes, the reporter, said, “If Isaac or Daniel decided to trade my story for an interview, I leave the room” and, presumably, the company. Univision executives also ask whether, even if they were totally unethical, they would be so stupid as to try to blackmail Rubio staff members on a call with two company attorneys. And if Burgos was outraged by Lee’s alleged “quid pro quo,” why did he not mention it in his e-mail to Lee the day after the call? When asked this question, Burgos declined to respond.

The Herald reporter Marc Caputo says that the tip for the story first came to the Herald “from friends of Rubio.” Caputo found the story credible in part because he thinks that Univision has become so partisan that it would be willing to cross journalistic lines to have the opportunity to grill Rubio on immigration. He said, in an e-mail, that the network “has virtually crusaded on behalf of its viewership for the Dream Act,” and that “it’s not tough to believe” that the network would have “essentially punished Rubio for not going along with the program.”

One can fairly ask, as Caputo does, whether Univision crossed boundaries to hype its story. For example, soon after the story ran, a Univision reporter, reading from prepared notes, ambushed Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, by asking, “If something happened or they discovered something about your brother-in-law—this is a hypothetical case—would you resign?”

One can also ask, as the Herald and Rubio do, whether Univision should have aired the story at all. It was pushing the limits of privacy and, though it can persuasively argue that Orlando Cicilia’s arrest and his life might have had an influence on Rubio, the story produced no evidence that this was so or that Cicilia was instrumental in any of Rubio’s campaigns. Still, Univision has a plausible response. “We are not here to get into the private lives of people,” Isaac Lee said. “We don’t look at who is having an affair with whom. But when you put together your nephew’s participation in the campaign . . . and a family member who was part of a criminal organization, you really ought to know how that impacted” Rubio’s life.

Regardless of where you come down, Presidential debates on prominent media outlets are not usually boycotted because of somewhat overhyped news stories or murky civic debates. It seems much more likely that boycotting a debate on Univision was a convenient way for the Republican candidates to appease Senator Rubio and, at the same time, avoid engaging in a debate on the eve of the Florida primary that would likely inflame Hispanics. And there’s little question that a debate sponsored by Univision, which Republicans now seem to view the way Democrats view Fox, would have been much tougher than one sponsored by Telemundo.

Senator Rubio is right that voters see the economy as the most pivotal issue of the campaign. A nationwide Univision poll this fall of a thousand Hispanic registered voters encouraged Republicans, because it revealed that only one in three “strongly approves of the President,” a lower level of support than Obama received in 2008. There was also, however, reason for Republicans to be frightened by the poll. Nearly two-thirds of those polled, when offered a hypothetical candidate whose economic policies they embraced “but who used strong anti-immigrant rhetoric,” said that “the rhetoric would make them less likely to vote for that candidate.” As with candidates perceived as anti-Israel by Jews, or racist by blacks, an anti-immigrant perception is toxic among Hispanics. A December poll from impreMedia and Latino Decisions revealed that seventy-three per cent of Hispanics believe that the Republican Party either doesn’t “care too much” about Hispanics or is “hostile” to them.

It’s also not clear that stringent immigration positions are preferred by non-Hispanics during a general election. A Univision poll this fall of a thousand Americans found that nearly sixty per cent of them, and fifty-three per cent of those identified as Republicans, favored “a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.” Starting with the January 31st Florida primary, and then moving on to primaries in other states with substantial Hispanic populations—Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, California—immigration issues will be prominent. “The Republican Party doesn’t have a monolithic position,” Steve Schmidt says, noting that the Republican governors of Nevada and New Mexico are Hispanic. But he worries that the Republican candidates for President who have spoken harshly about illegal immigrants will find it difficult to extract themselves from the box they’ve sealed themselves in.

Yet the candidates don’t seem to be worried about the long-term consequences of the positions they’ve taken to win primaries. When I spoke with a top Romney strategist, he acknowledged that better communication with Hispanic voters is “something I’m not immersed in at the moment.” A prominent national Republican who did not want to be identified agreed with Schmidt. Taking a harsh stand against immigration, he says, “is unbelievable shortsightedness,” because it ignores a fundamental truth about elections: “Issues are not how voters decide. It’s what kind of a person they think the person is. They don’t like people who they feel don’t like them.” Debating on Univision might have solidified those views, or it might have given the candidates a chance to truly ameliorate them.

Republicans speak of Senator Rubio as a Vice-Presidential candidate in large part because they think he can help deliver Hispanic voters. But it’s not clear that he can. In the 2010 Senate election, he won fifty-five per cent of the Hispanic vote, but this was mostly because he won three-quarters of the Cuban vote. He won only about a third of the Puerto Rican vote and not much more of the remainder of the Hispanic vote. Jeb Bush, a Florida Republican with softer positions on immigration than Rubio—he has supported tuition breaks for the children of illegal immigrants, for example—won nearly two-thirds of the Hispanic vote in his last state-wide election, including fifty-five per cent of the Puerto Rican vote. In the December poll by impreMedia and Latino Decisions, only thirteen per cent of Hispanics said that Rubio’s inclusion on the national ticket would make them much more likely to vote Republican; ten per cent said it would make them much less likely.

Rubio’s potential appeal to immigrants who have struggled to become citizens probably wasn’t helped when, in late October, the Washington Post and the St. Petersburg Times reported that, contrary to Rubio’s claims, his parents were not “exiles,” who fled Cuba after Castro seized control, in January, 1959. They arrived on legal visas, three years earlier, when Fulgencio Batista was President. Since Rubio was not born until 1971, his telling of the story could be an honest mistake; or maybe it was just a bit of puffery on a résumé. Whatever the case, Rubio’s battles with Univision, and his hard-line position on immigration, will not advance his popularity among Hispanics. Jorge Ramos asks a question that he undoubtedly would have asked Senator Rubio on “Al Punto”: “What would happen to his parents if they were to arrive today from a Latin-American country?”

Rubio has a good tale to tell. His family struggled, and he has earned his success. A more experienced politician might have handled the July phone call to Barbara Cicilia very differently and coolly behaved like the humble son described by Rubio’s mentor, Al Cardenas. Rubio could have described his brother-in-law’s story as one of redemption, not shame. He could have said that Orlando Cicilia committed a crime and was properly punished for it. With the benefit of understanding, and family support, he was then able to emerge as a productive U.S. citizen. That, Rubio could have said, is a truly American story. ♦

The Republican junior senator from Texas is the far right’s most formidable advocate—and a 2016 contender.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.